Sam Bankman-Fried’s parents loom large over FTX’s fall—and their son’s trial
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How did the son of two Stanford professors who hosted salons about morality become accused of one of the largest corporate fraud scandals of all time?
Heading to college at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Sam Bankman-Fried had a single career path on his mind. “I thought, Maybe I’ll be a professor or something, ’cause it’s what people do,” he told a colleague in 2020. That was, after all, the main career track he’d seen as he’d grown up on and around the Stanford University campus, where his parents were well-respected law professors—his father, Joseph Bankman, with a focus on tax law; his mother, Barbara Fried, on economics, philosophy, and morality.
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